The question was rhetorical, not literal. I asked it of the air, more or less, as my husband was driving the car. At the same time that I asked it rhetorically, I meant it absolutely.

I recently talked to someone I know who told me that she’d “left” the Catholic Church. She’s now attending one of those smorgasbord mega-congregations where they serve you Jesus-as-you-like-him. I felt as if I was listening to a person who’d told me that they had decided to give up eating balanced meals and ingest nothing cotton candy and donuts.

I get as aggravated with the Church as the next Catholic. I don’t mind at all saying that I think this bishop or that has gotten it wrong. I’ve been very outspoken about the failure to stop child sex abuse by priests. Very. I’ve been equally outspoken about the failure in some quarters to take a strong stand on basic Church teaching, and the propensity of some bishops for throwing hapless underlings under the proverbial bus so the bishop can pander to the crowds. I just recently wrote a rather strong series of posts on the question of the Church and rape.

Our wonderful Church gives us great freedom to think and let think, and I exercise that freedom.

Me, speaking at the march. Copyright: Diocese of Tulsa. Used with Permission. All Rights Reserved.

I have the privilege of speaking for the babies at Mother and Unborn Baby Care of Southeastern Michigan’s fundraising dinner this Thursday.

People who volunteer at crisis pregnancy centers are pro life heroes. Helping them in their life-saving work is a blessing and a gift to me.

If you’re in Southeastern Michigan, I’d love to meet you. Just be sure you bring your pen and checkbook so you can donate to Mother and Unborn Baby Care. $ for crisis pregnancy centers is $ that saves the lives of precious baby boys and girls. There’s no better way to spend your cash than that.

For the first time ever, Rebecca Hamilton–author of the popular Public Catholic blog here on Patheos and a former legislator in the Oklahoma House of Representatives–is coming to Southeastern Michigan.

Rebecca will be the keynote speaker at Mother and Unborn Baby Care’s spring benefit dinner this Thursday, May 28.

Her story will touch your heart: Not always a pro-life Catholic, Rebecca was the first Director of NARAL (the National Abortion Rights Action League) in the state of Oklahoma. But following her conversion, she went on to sponsor and advance some of the strongest pro-life legislation in her state.

And to get last-minute tickets to the Mother And Unborn Baby Care dinner, which will be held at the lovely San Marino Club in Troy, call 248.559.7576. The registration deadline has passed, but if you HURRY, I hope you’ll still be able to get a seat!

Charles Dickens would have loved Rebecca Hamilton. “A Tale of Two Citizens…

“It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.” Thus might a pro-life observer describe Rebecca’s two separate stints in the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

For you see, when Representative Hamilton served for six years in the legislature in the 1980’s. Before that, she had been the state director for the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). She used her considerable legislative skills on both the House floor and the House Public Health Committee, which she chaired, to make it as difficult as possible to pass pro-life bills. Indeed, she was a master of parliamentary sleight-of-hand in the pursuit of her “pro-choice” objectives.

Representative Hamilton and I were on opposite sides of the abortion issue continually during those six years during the ’80’s, and when she retired from the House at that time, she said to me: “Tony, you go your way and I’ll go my way, because abortion is an issue about which we are NEVER going to agree.”

But then, some years later, an amazing thing happened — something almost akin to what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus. Rebecca Hamilton wasn’t on horseback at the time, as was the future Saint Paul. She was driving her car one day, and she was reflecting on a confluence of recent events, and suddenly the right to life issue was brought into a very sharp, and very different, focus for her; she had become a mother, and she had experienced a religious conversion. And suddenly she knew, as she sat behind the wheel that day, that she had been — through all those earlier years — on the wrong side of the abortion issue…

It took great courage to do what she did next, but Rebecca decided to return to public life — to come back to the Oklahoma House of Representatives after a 15 year absence, this time as a PRO-LIFE legislator, a pro-life Democrat, in a party that has been less than friendly toward pro-life candidates. Rebecca persevered, and was elected six straight times, until term limits brought her service to an end this past November.

She had come back, as she so simply and humbly says, “To make amends.” To try to right the wrongs, repair the damage, make up for whatever bad example she might have given through her earlier support for abortion…

And she succeeded in rectifying those earlier mistakes to a degree she could never have imagined. On the strength of her own determination, she won pro-life legislative battles against all odds. Through her powers of persuasion, she transformed her party’s pro-abortion caucus into a largely pro-life caucus. By virtue of her unyielding commitment to making the pro-life issue a transcendent, bipartisan concern in the House, she has helped mightily to make the right to life the Oklahoma legislature’s #1 priority.

Rebecca Hamilton has been a tremendous force for good, and she will be acutely missed at the state Capitol. In part because of her background and history, she has been a uniquely effective and powerful voice for the unborn child. And through her principled, selfless, and courageous service, she has earned the deepest respect of those all across the political spectrum for her tireless and unwavering commitment to the sanctity of human life.

Tony Lauinger, Vice President, National Right to Life State Chairman, Oklahomans For Life

The organizers of the 6th Annual Tulsa March for Life have given me the opportunity to do what I love to do the most: Speak for the basic and fundamental right to life of all human beings, particularly the babies.

Every time I get the opportunity to do something for life, it is a gift of unmerited grace.

Years ago, when I was on my knees with grief over what I had done in my pro choice/anti-God years, my dear and wonderful friend Susan Lepak said, “Don’t you know the babies are praying for you from heaven?”

That was one of the most healing sentences I’ve ever heard.

Katie Gordy, another wonderful and dear friend, gifted me — blessed me is really what she did — with a listening ear and her loving friendship during those days.

They, along with many other forgiving and saintly pro life people, helped me heal so that I could be of use in the fight for life. The beautiful thing is that the fight itself healed me, as well.

I am going to be the keynote speaker for this year’s 6th Annual Tulsa March for Life. It’s tomorrow night at 7 pm at 8th and Boulder in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

If you’re an Okie, or an Arkie, or a Kansan, (or anyone else) come on by. I would love to see you there.

Gwin Faulconer Lippert, a reporter at KTOK Radio, a local station here in Oklahoma City, did this interview with me last night. It’s a retrospective on my career in the legislature, which ends officially tomorrow.

I plan on taking my family out for Pizza at the Hideaway restaurant here in OKC. Just us. It’s about personal family memories.

I woke up this morning, thinking “this is my last day in office.” It kind of got to me. Then I sat down and prayed and God turned that bit of anxiety into peace and gratitude. I am so grateful that God gave me the chance to do two separate tours of duty in office. He let me come back in and pass important pro life legislation after I had killed pro life bills my first time around.

That is a measure of forgiveness that I do not deserve.

I am grateful and happy for the many privileges and gifts which God has given me in my life. My family, my home, the opportunity to affect events through public office, and now, the opportunity to continue working for the things I believe in another forum.

You wonderful people here at Public Catholic are among the many blessings God has given me.

I’m still on retreat for the rest of this month.

I am very glad I’ve taken this time off to pray and think. It has already given me a new outlook and a deeper understanding of where I’m going, and I’m only halfway through. I plan to come back to blogging in December. In the meantime, I’ll continue to drop an occasional link or thought here as things occur to me.

I am leaving the Oklahoma legislature. Last week was a week of formal goodbyes.

I gave a farewell speech to the House, which you can watch, if you’d like. Go here to see the video. The House Democrats held their annual Sine Die Party, and roasted me and other departing legislators. The Democratic Legislative Assistants prepared a delicious luncheon (Covered dish. All their best cooking. It was to die for.) with a cake with all our names and said another round of good-byes. I even got a small — and lovely — good-bye editorial in the Oklahoman.

We are still in the busiest time of the legislative process. We haven’t shut down. Not at all. That means I’m going to be tres busy until we actually do sine die. (Sine die is the motion we make to adjourn the legislative session.) But I am grateful beyond words to my colleagues for giving me these many avenues of good-bye.

Each of these things is a rite of passage for what has to be a huge transition in my life. Leaving the legislature is a little bit like a soldier, coming home from a war. You are leaving a combative, total environment which engages you on every level and returning to a world that now seems out of kilter by comparison.

Wherever people are for a period of time, that becomes their normal. Normal for me has long ago become the totally unreal world of elected politics.

At the same time, I am way past glad to be leaving. God gave me something like marching orders for the rest of my life a few years ago when I was sitting in the cathedral at Fatima. I’ve dithered since then, occupied and preoccupied by the legislative wars and the many needs of my constituents. If you don’t think that these things are a 24/7 occupation that devours of all your thoughts and passions, then, you my friend, have never been a legislator.

Those of us who legislate or who have legislated know that there are very few jobs that swallow you whole like legislating does. It is difficult to disengage enough to maintain your friendships and family and retain something of your personality.

As for fulfilling the call that God gave me, I found it well nigh impossible. I need more than corners of time in my days to write the things He wants me to write. I’m not going to discuss in detail what I think this is all about. I have a lot of praying to do first.

I do know that I am not going to abandon the political process. I am also not going to stop writing about the intersection of public life and Christianity on this blog. I will, if anything, be a lot more free to talk about these issues now that I’m not bound to protect the privacy of so many people.

That is not to say that I will be talking about closed door conversations with my colleagues or divulging the almost endless private things that my constituents have shared with me through 18 years of elected office.

I have represented, cared for and cared about thousands of people for a very long time. In the course of that, many of them have opened their souls to me. I have never and I will never talk about the people who trusted me to be their voice in government and who honored me by opening their lives and hearts to me in conversations that were in fact and in truth non-sacramental confessions.

All these things I take with me to my grave.

What I will talk about is the intersection of public policy and publicly stated comments, actions, etc. I’ve operated for a long time using the standard that if something is published and circulated publicly, I can talk about it. That won’t change. It will, rather, be enhanced by the fact that I know what’s behind these things. I will be a lot less guarded in my opinions in the future when I do not have the responsibility for many thousands of people on my shoulders.

Christians in America have a mountain in front of us. After more than two hundred years of having things our way, we are faced with a society in which we are beleaguered. We live in post Christian America. Our task is to re-convert our nation to Christ. Right now, we are not up to that task. We are, in fact, confused, divided and overawed by our opposition.

That’s what I’m going to write about. Because somebody needs to do it. And because I am uniquely qualified for the job.

My favorite Representative Hamilton photo. From Rose Day 2014.

I tried to remember to thank everyone in this speech, but I somehow forgot to mention — even though I wrote their names down and they were right in front of me — two of the most important people. Louise Scoles, who fought for my election and was my sponsor when I entered the Catholic Church. And George Violette, my brother by another mother, who is family in every way except blood. I love both of you.

The “Tony” I introduce in the video is Tony Lauinger, president of Oklahomans for Life and Vice President of National Right to Life. He is my friend. I know that he will remain my friend after I leave office.

A reader asked if I had written about my conversion. I wrote this a while back and republish it here.

I’ve written about other people’s miracle stories. Now, I’ll tell you about one of my own.

I think most Christians have miracle stories. Mine is the fundamental Christian miracle, the accessible and universally available miracle. I am going to tell you about the day I stepped, blundered actually, from death to life.

I lived about 17 years of my life in an anti-God mindset. There were reasons for this. To this day, I understand myself and accept that when I made the turn away from God, I did the only thing I could have done under that circumstance.

I didn’t decide that there was no god. I tried. I read the atheist books of the day; Passover Plot among them. I went back a few decades and read Why I Am Not A Christian. I actually wanted to believe there was no god. It would have been a great simplifier for me in those days.

But the books I read were essentially self-refuting. You can’t think them through too seriously and miss the train-sized holes in their line of reasoning.

In truth, I knew there was a god. I’m not sure how I knew. But I did. My problem wasn’t that I thought he wasn’t there. It was that I thought he didn’t care.

I didn’t come to a point where I decided Today I Will Become Anti-god. I just sort of segued into it, one decision, one discussion, one opposing commitment at a time.

By the time I was into my 20s, I was thoroughly launched on my anti-god way of living, thinking and reacting. The fight to defend Roe v Wade and legal access to abortion pushed me hard toward an aggressive anti-god mode.

What had been a walking away became, through the catalyst of my pro-abortion stand, a fierce resentment. I detested the various churches for their opposition to Roe. I thought, believed to my core, that they were utterly indifferent to the sufferings of women.

This wasn’t all just a web I wove in my own mind. I knew of actual instances of churches turning away from women who were in great distress; of them abandoning these women or even attacking them.

To say I was angry over this hardly touches it. I was enraged, bitter and hard as a diamond about it. I knew there was a god. But I also thought I knew that he didn’t care. I had no use for him.

I did a lot of things in this period of my life that I regret now. I wish I could tell you that everything I ever did that I regret I did then, but that isn’t true. However, my most dastardly deeds, including the one time I ever hurt another person deliberately, selfishly and with full intention, happened during those years.

I was, in the way I judged myself at that time, certain that I was a good person and that everything I was doing was not only right but morally superior. Even the one thing that I absolutely knew was wrong didn’t bother me.

This peculiar moral certitude of moral ingrates is, I believe, a direct consequence of being your own god. If you decide what is right and wrong, it’s pretty easy to be morally proud 24/7. I encounter it in people who are their own gods all the time. The difference being that now I know it for what it is.

As time went by, this one thing I couldn’t justify to myself ate at me. I knew I had hurt another person. Worse, I knew that I had decided to hurt another person and done it for entirely selfish reasons. I stood convicted in my own court by my own rules. That brought me face to face with one of the sadder realities of living life as your own god: When you come to that place where you see that you have really been wrong, you can’t make it right.

You are stuck there, you and your guilt, in a battle for your peace of mind that you can only win by hardening your heart and “going on.” If you do that, of course, it will be much easier to do the wrong again. And again. And again forever until you die. You become wedded to your sin and in time it becomes who you are.

I was stuck there, at that precise fork in the moral road. I could either tell myself to forget about it, or even, as many people do, blame the person I had hurt, or I could face my own fault. It’s never an easy thing to face the fact that you are really not such a good person. But in truth none of us are. We only pretend, and mostly we pretend to ourselves.

Fortunately for me, I wasn’t able to take that sharp turn into the abyss and send my healthy and completely justified guilt away. I knew what I had done.

I didn’t talk about it. Didn’t share it with anyone. I kept it inside me.

The tension grew.

I have tried many times to find the words to describe what happened next. But I can’t do it. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no words.

I was alone in my car, driving to Enid Oklahoma to make a speech. Without thinking about it or really understanding what I was doing, I blurted out two words. Forgive me, I said. I said it out loud. But I wasn’t talking to myself. I was talking to the God who didn’t care.

Here’s where words fail me. I’ll try, but please understand: I have no words for what happened next.

I said Forgive me, and it was as if someone, some Being, Who had been right beside me all along without my knowing of it, reached out to me. I felt this Being’s joy for me, experienced His absolute, ecstatic love. I had a physical sensation of this love, pouring into me, filling me with His joy.

As I said, there are no words. I didn’t understand exactly what was happening. But I knew it was real. I also learned in one instant that the god who doesn’t care was my own creation. God, the real God, loves us beyond anything we can comprehend, or, in my case, describe.

I didn’t understand what had just happened. I went on to my meeting, made my speech, and said not a word about it to anyone. But it wasn’t an apprehensive silence. The Being I met in the car that day stayed with me. He kept me enveloped in love and I basked in it.

I also waited. Waiting is not something that comes naturally to me. I am most definitely not the waiting around kind. But this time, waiting came easily. I didn’t know what to do next, so I waited, with complete peace of mind that the answers would come, for this Being to tell me what to do.

About a month later, it came into my head to go to a large metropolitan church. I did, and over time, that path has led me to where I am now.

As I said, this is the most prosaic and commonplace of miracles. It is freely available to anyone who asks for it with a sincere heart. It’s free for the asking. But I wouldn’t say that it’s cheap. I’ll talk about the cost in other posts at other times.

Today, I just want to add one of my miracles to the ones I’ve been sharing. I also want to make it clear that the real miracle here isn’t that I experienced these things, but what they meant. I said two words from my heart to a God I had come to believe didn’t care, and I stepped from death to life.

Click here throughout the Year of Faith, as the Catholic Channel at Patheos.com invites Catholics of every age and stripe to share what they are gleaning and carrying away from this gift of timely focus.

Representative Rebecca Hamilton, 18-year member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives talks about life as a Public Catholic. Read her Bio Here

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I want Public Catholic to be a welcoming place. As my mother would say, be polite. What that means is use courtesy and civility. It also means do not attempt to hijack the board with your personal agendas. Public Catholic is a Catholic, Christian blog. I created it to empower Christians to stand for Jesus in today's world. Repetitive, harassing attacks against the faith, Jesus or the Church are not welcome here. Address others with respect and refer to public figures in the same way. No name calling. No cursing. No hitting. No spitting.